Now Whirlpool Threatens Workers Who Protest Plant Closing

• Whirlpool closes a plant in Evansville
• Taxpayers will shoulder the unemployment and other costs.
• All the local supplier, transportation and other third-party jobs are destroyed.
• Even more home foreclosures in the area as a result.
• Local businesses are stressed or have to go out of business.
• They are playing nearby Iowa against Indiana for tax breaks and subsidies to keep just a few of the jobs.
• Whirlpool is profiting from making all this someone else’s problem.
• And, of course, Wall Street celebrates the move.

A Whirlpool spokesperson responded, leading to the post, Whirlpool Exec Responds: The System Made Us Do It, taking a look at the bigger picture that forces our companies like Whirlpool to do these things that destroy people, communities and our economy,

The spokesperson for Whirlpool is exactly right. It is the system that makes them do this. They are only following the market’s orders.

A major corporation planning to shut down a factory in Indiana has warned its union workers that they’ll endanger their future job prospects if they protest the plant’s closing.

. . . Activists planned a high-profile protest for this Friday, with AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka visiting the plant for the first time. But Whirlpool says the effort is futile — they are fully committed to shutting the plant down. The company, however, still seems quite wary of the potential for bad publicity. In a memo sent to its employees and passed along to the Huffington Post, Paul Coburn, division vice president for Whirlpool’s Evansville Division, offers a fairly explicit warning to his workers: If they join Trumka’s protest they would seriously risk future employment opportunity.

About Dave Johnson

Dave has more than 20 years of technology industry experience. His earlier career included technical positions, including video game design at Atari and Imagic. He was a pioneer in design and development of productivity and educational applications of personal computers. More recently he helped co-found a company developing desktop systems to validate carbon trading in the US.